"Forgetting Dad" official film website

W-Film has organized a series of special screenings of FORGETTING DAD followed by discussions with medical experts. These events promise to shed new perspectives on my father’s amnesia, and will surely be fascinating to attend. Here are the details:

Frankfurt/Main: SO 6. Juni, 17.45 Uhr, Orfeos Erben, mit Dr. Hartwig Spors vom Max Planck Institut

Köln: SO 6. Juni, 11 Uhr, Odeon Kino, mit Dipl. Psychiater M. Flöter, Dipl. Psychiater G. Hoika-Messing-Flöter und Dipl. Psychiater B. Schoog

Oldenburg: SO 6. Juni, 17.45 Uhr, Casablanca Kino, mit Prof. Dr. A. Engelhardt

Wiesbaden: SO 6. Juni, 20 Uhr, Walhala Kino, mit Prof. Dr. Hecht

Berlin: MO 7. Juni, 19 Uhr, Sputnik, mit Prof. Dr. Niendegger (FU Berlin) und Prof. Denissen

München: Do 10. Juni, 18.30 Uhr, Neues Arena, mit Dr. B. Knab (Wissenschaftsautorin)

Leipzig: SA 12. Juni, 21 Uhr, Kinobar Prager Frühling, mit Prof. Dr. Konrad Reschke

It always seems to rain whenever I’m in Munich, but the drizzle didn’t dampen my spirits. The Neues Arena was nearly full with a very interested crowd, mostly over 50. That seems to be the age of the viewers who can relate best to the film – people old enough to have adult children, and to be able to sympathize with both my father and the attempts of his children to come to grips with what has happened in our family as a result of his amnesia.

The Q & A, which extended into a small group discussion at the Indian restaurant across the street afterwards, continued the dialogue that began in Weimar last night, and cast further doubts on how my father was treated, especially when it comes to his relationship with Dr. Karen, a.k.a. ‘Mom’. A psychotherapist in attendance told me about the black sheep in the therapy world see dollar signs whenever someone like my father crosses their paths. They know there’s settlement money, and that all they have to do is comfort the patient a bit, and they’ve got a steady income for years and years. When I discovered in the courthouse documents that Dr. Karen’s husband wrote the one report for the court case, the whole set-up seemed even fishier.

Maybe I’m getting a bit cynical in this regard, but I met Dr. Karen on two different occasions at very different stages of Dad’s life as ‘New Richard’ and felt really uneasy about their peculiar relationship in which Dad seemed to be unable to make any decisions on his own without consulting with ‘Mom’ first. Surely she helped him a lot in his daily struggles to adjust to life as a kid in a grown-up’s body in a very strange world, but now it seems quite certain that she wasn’t terribly interested in helping my father find his way back to his former life as ‘Old Richard.’ She certainly never made much of an effort to contact members of Dad’s family to learn more about ‘Old Richard.’

Sadly, nothing can be done about any of this now. I only hope that the film continues to be seen and gain attention, and that people in similar situations have better luck coming to terms with the challenges of mental illness than my family has. It would be great if mental illness were demystified, and if more people would talk openly about it. Many forms of mental illness are treatable, but that treatment requires good professional care, better awareness of the situation, time, and a lot of love and caring from family, friends, and colleagues. Sadly, in most case the person suffering is too frightened or ashamed to reach out for help, fearing that everyone will see the illness as a weakness. But I’ve now come to believe that the experience of going through mental illness and learning to cope with it can be a tremendous learning experience for everyone involved and can actually strengthen family relations. Bringing my extended family a bit closer together through the making of FORGETTING DAD has been a deeply rewarding experience for me, and I continue to get great comfort out of having such a large, very diverse family I can call my own.

I missed my connection train in Bonn and ended up on an ICE barreling toward Frankfurt/Main at speeds of up to 296 km/h (184 mph). I felt like I was being rocketed through tunnels and across the rolling green landscapes, and wondered if human bodies are really built to travel at such speeds. What a contrast to the leisurely pace of the regional trains of the past couple of days.

It was a pleasure to arrive in Weimar and wander through the streets of one of my favorite cities in Germany. The home of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar is the epitome of the Age of Enlightenment. It’s hard not to be captivated by the gorgeous old architecture and delightful parks.

The screening was small but the discussion quite intense. A psychologist in the crowd, who was quite moved by the film, got me talking about all kinds of things, including Dad’s therapist Dr. Karen. Even though his own mother was still alive and helped out quite a lot during the first months of Dad’s amnesia, Dr. Karen is the one Dad called ‘Mom.’ Psychologists might brush this off as a simple case of ‘transference,’ but there’s no denying that it’s very strange how my father latched onto some strange woman and played ‘son’ to her ‘mother’. At an early stage of editing, we put this story in the film, but it was too bizarre and didn’t feel right. Plus it was awkward that we never got to see this mysterious Dr. Karen. And in some way I felt like the scene betrayed my father. But judging by the reactions I get whenever I tell this story, I now wish we’d found some way to slip it into the film. It might have been a counterweight to my grandmother’s story about taking Dad to a psychiatrist, and how he refused to go back to this horrible man who was accusing him of things that weren’t true.

The psychologist at tonight’s screening found the whole ‘Mom’ thing odd, and shared my opinion that Dr. Karen was enabling Dad in his new existence as ‘New Richard’ rather than challenging him to confront the realities of ‘Old Richard’s’ life. If a psychotherapist’s job is to listen and to intervene at key moments in order to get through to the patient and make him see what’s causing his distress and to search for ways to improve the situation, then as far as I can gather, this isn’t what Dr. Karen was doing. Or maybe by the time Dad started seeing her, he was already so deep into his ‘New Richard’ thing that there was no pulling him back out.

It was nice to hear some praise for the film’s imagery and editing, and I’m happy to pass on these compliments to Axel and Matt. Another film Axel shot a few years back just so happens to be playing open air in Weimar tomorrow – Michael Schorr’s Schultze Gets the Blues.

Afterward the screening, I went out for some drinks with Edgar Hartung, who runs the Kino Mon Ami, and Wolfgang Kissel from the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Wolfgang was in the jury of a festival where my Branson film Heaven on Earth won a prize, and he and Edgar organized a screening of it and some of my other films at the Kino Mon Ami back in 2002. It was nice to catch up with the two. But the real fun started when Herbert Lachmayer – a hilarious old scholar from Linz, Austria who is delivering a lecture tomorrow night at the Bauhaus University – joined us. Before long, Herbert was on a roll, wipping up words which had my head spinning: ‘Geschmacksintelligenz’ (‘taste intelligence’), ‘pornosophisch’ (‘pornosophical’), ‘Kleinbürgerfundamentalismus’ (‘bourgeois fundementalism’), and on and on.

In a jovial way, Herbert condensed the past three centuries of European cultural history into a kind of Weltanschauung (view of the world) which made me scratch my head while lights went on inside at the same time. It felt like something that could happen only in a place like Weimar, in the warmly elegant Residenz restaurant which, like the town itself, exudes a feeling of intellectualism I’ve felt nowhere else like this.

In a nutshell, Herbert lamented the bourgeois fundamentalism of our age, and pondered when a kind of fin-de-siècle spirit would surface and make us all realize how superficial the performance-oriented society we’ve enslaved ourselves in really is. Without coming across as nostalgic or whiny, Herbert brought up the fact that while the times we live in today are exciting in many ways, they lack the magical intertwining of art, intellect and political power which made the Weimar era so magical. Almighty capitalism has all but extinguished any and all remnants of the spirit of the Enlightenment. At what other time did artists and intellectuals have such an extraordinary power over the ruling class?

The tour through Rhineland-Westfalia continued today with screenings in Aachen and Cologne. I’d never been to Aachen before, but it always looked kind of nice out the train window on my various trips to Paris, so I was curious to see more of the town. Like most German cities, it’s an odd mix of old buildings reconstructed after WWII and mostly ugly new buildings quickly erected after the war. But at least Aachen has a nice old town center and a stunning cathedral well worth seeing.

The Apollo Kino is a fun place which these days lives more off of parties than showing movies. The theater where FORGETTING DAD was playing had a bar in the back and chairs which could be easily removed to turn the place into a party room, where I’m told things get pretty wild and the bouncers have their hands full.

When I heard that Aachen is a college town, I was hopeful that lots of students would show up. But ever since the liberal arts departments were phased out in the 1990s and the university shifted its focus to engineering and science, the students have all but abandoned the Apollo and its arthouse programming in favor of high-tech Hollywood spectacles à la Terminator at the local multiplex. In a town of 220,000 with 45,000 students, these changes at the university all but killed arthouse cinema in Aachen. Now most Apollo audiences are in the 50-60 year range. Today, only three women showed up. I gave a little intro, then had a steak dinner with the technical director of the cinema, who gave me the scoop on the whole situation there, and told me how Wim Wenders had been there a few years ago with his film Palermo Shooting, and also had the steak with pepper sauce.

I made it to Cologne in plenty of time for the 8 p.m. premiere, and was happy to be welcomed by all the kind folks at W-Film, who are really doing a terrific job at getting FORGETTING DAD into theaters. The place was about half full like in Düsseldorf, and the crowd was appreciative. The Q & A went on for about 45 minutes. Some audience members appeared to be more frustrated with the lack of a clear answer in the film than I am, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be in my shoes or anyone else’s in my family. I guess I’ve just had more time to come to terms with the whole situation, and am no longer angry and horrified by it.

After the Q & A, a 60ish gentleman came up to me and told me how his son disappeared in the US ten years ago. He wanted to know if I had any tips on how to track him down. He was clearly distressed by the situation, and I felt a bit clueless about how to help him. Here was a father who desperately wants to reconnect with his son, and I’m a son who wants to reconnect with his father, who is apparently doing his best to keep his former life at bay.

After sleeping on it, I’ve thought of a few ways to help this man, so if you’re out there reading this, please contact me.

Many thanks to Miriam, Stephan and everyone at W-Film as well as Martin Roelly and the good folks from the Odeon Kino for being so supportive, and making the evening a delight!

31 May 2010: My first trip to Düsseldorf aside from spending the night at the airport once last year. Walking into the Metropol Kino felt a bit like entering an old Wim Wenders film – some kind of cozy remnant of an old world left virtually untouched by 21st century frenzy. I immediately felt at home, and got a real kick out of the kind folks from the theater as well as the hilarious photographer Wolfgang Vaneick, who was always dreaming up some new way of getting me to pose here and there.

Nothing remarkable to report about the Q & A. Just doing my thing and happy so many people asked questions and stuck around to the end. Hopefully word-of-mouth will spread and the film will play here for a while. It was definitely nice to see a bigger crowd than in Saarbrücken. Special thanks to Olga from W-Film and to Eric Horst, Frank Wickinghoff, and all the nice folks at the Metropol for being such kind hosts.

One of the many nice benefits of touring around the country is getting to see old friends again. Here in Düsseldorf I stayed with Lukas and Mina, whom I met through a mutual friend in Berlin way back in the early-1990s, and visited again a couple of times when we were all living in LA for a while. We had fallen out of touch until our paths crossed on Facebook last year. It was a lot of fun having them come see FORGETTING DAD with their daughter Shay, and hanging out with them afterwards.

Off to Aachen and Cologne tomorrow.

After a 6 1/2 train ride through some lovely and very green countryside with occasional showers along the way (I love riding trains through the rain!), I kicked off the German Kinotour last night in Saarbrücken to an intimate crowd of eleven at the Filmhaus. Fortunately, the screening was in the small theater, so it didn’t feel quite so empty. I’d never been to this part of the country until the German premiere of FORGETTING DAD at the Max-Ophüls-Festival here last year, which was a mixed experience. As a film student, I’d heard so many wonderful things about the festival, but the whole time there I felt really old. It was the moment when I realized that I definitely no longer belong to the “Filmnachwuchs,” the group of emerging filmmakers German funders love to support. The saving moment of the whole festival was a special screening of LOLA MONTES by Saarbücken’s favorite son Max Ophüls – a real treat!

Last night’s discussion went on for about an hour. The audience was appreciative, and theater manager Michael Jurich did a good job of keeping the discussion moving. The questions were mostly the same ones I’ve been receiving all around the world, but when someone asked how my kids feel about the film, I had to thing about the long-term impact FORGETTING DAD might have on my family. My kids are still too young to give much thought to the film. Only my eleven-year-old son Jonathan can remember my father (he’s the little kid in the garden scene with my father and Tracy). My eight-year-old son Leander also met him briefly three years ago, when I last saw my father in Oregon. But that was a strange encounter where he hid behind my legs the whole time, seemingly frightened by the gray-haired, gray-bearded stranger who gave me about fifteen minutes of his time before “terminating” our relationship – a threat I didn’t take seriously at the time, but which he made good on.

This morning I met with a producer acquaintance in Saarbrücken. She worked as a family therapist before becoming a prominent politician in Saarland. After ten years of that, she tried something totally different and became a film producer. When I mentioned having spent much of last year traveling around the world with FORGETTING DAD and consequently not getting much of anything else done when it comes to getting new projects off the ground, she said there was nothing wrong with that. It’s all part of the healing process and my way of dealing with my family’s trauma. Even though my kids are still too young to really understand what I’ve been up to these past years, they’ll someday see the film and all my work on it as a positive example of how to cope with family trauma. The long-term benefits will far outweigh the short-term trials and tribulations involved in making and showing the film.

With that in mind, I’m going to plunge into all the craziness of touring around the country this week, and enjoy every minute of it!